Octava Digital Cable - Standard Version

STEALTH VariDig, STEALTH SEXTET & Octava and DIGITAL CABLES in general

Preface
Incorporated in 1999, STEALTH Audio Cables is still a young company and - fortunately for the customers,-
we simply have no other way to survive and make our way in the overcrowded World of today's high-end cables but
to make our products speak for themselves. Every particular approach in our cable designs is there because it
makes clear sense, and - being the chief designer - I am able and willing to explain why it's there, and why certain
things are done a certain way. The choice of conductive and dielectric materials, connectors, structure
(core) materials is very careful: we try to leave positively nothing without attention. As I progress in my understanding
of how things work, and thus progress in my design ability, the more material and parts are custom made for us - or
made in our little laboratory and in our (still small) prototype shop. The standard, off-the-shelf materials simply cannot
do what's needed
 
DESIGN HISTORY
Our customers and dealers often ask: what do you do differently compare to other cable companies? - I can easily talk for hours about this. A lot of things that we currently do is done, or mentioned, or thought about by no-one else... A partial list of these things, used in the Varidig Sextet:

The Varidig Sextet is, in fact, six-in-one: six Varidig cables, combined into one Sextet cable. The individual cables are wrapped around a braided center core, and terminated with the absolute best available (custom, STEALTH designed and made especially for DIGITAL audio transmission) connectors; each of the six Varidig cables has a solid core center (signal) wire, and a quad-layer, variable pitch LITZ return.

The Sextet concept is similar to running several DAC chips in parallel in digital-to-analog converter (several well known and highly advanced designers do that). Sometimes this configuration is called "stacked DACs".
The STEALTH Octava design is obviously based on the same concept, but takes it a bit further, running EIGHT full individual Varidig cables in parallel.

This concept offers better low-level resolution and better resonance control, which results in better approximation of the musical signal form, less after-ringing and pre-ringing (which is, according to some sources, one of the main reasons for digital audio to sound differently compare to the analog) 
Sextet and Octava are digital cable that has no analogies in the cable world (pan intended). Below is a list of unique and unusual things in the STEALTH Varidig Sextet and the Octava:

1. No company known to us offers variable (changing along the length) geometry digital cables.

2. No other cable designer known to us runs several identical digital cables in parallel.

3. Porous Teflon - which is better than solid Teflon - is not a common dielectric in cables;\

4. Kevlar is stronger than steel, but I am not aware of any other cable to use it as a cable core;

5. In STEALTH custom RCA connectors, the dielectric is Teflon, and contacts are solid silver – which is better than any plated material.

6. Nobody uses anything like Sextet termination cones, machined of Teflon, adjacent to the RCA connectors, to give a cable the geometry it needs to keep the impedance connect while the cable approaches the termination point.

7. We also make our own XLR connectors (Teflon dielectric, very light hollow solid silver contacts, Kevlar supports, locking ability intact, machined carbon fiber shells).... I mention this because even the best and most known connectors manufacturers (WBT, for example) do not make their own XLR connectors: it's too difficult and expensive. Cardas, Furutech and XHadow do offer their XLRs, but ours are OBJECTIVELY better.

8.The Sextet cable is flexible and very user friendly, but it is extremely robust (is virtually unbreakable) because of its Kevlar center core. I actually thought about giving a little funny demonstration at one of the shows: towing a car, by another car, using the Indra or the Sextet as the towing line, and then showing that the cables will still work, electrically, after such abuse.

9. Nobody uses LITZ for digital cables "return" (this gives more "transparent" ground path and worked to higher frequencies, and helps reducing effect of the RF and EMI pollution of the ground path).

10. Nobody uses variable wrapping pitch is cables geometry to control resonances. This is like using multiple ports in a ported loudspeaker box: the higher "Q" main resonance is broken into several smaller ones with lower Q, and the resulting characteristic is much more linear.

11. Since the cables are made by hand, we can fine tune both their electrical and mechanical damping separately (details below).

12. An assembled RCA-terminated Varidig Sextet cable is very light weight (under 2 Oz, including the connectors!!!) and extremely flexible....
 

To talk more about the Sextet and the Octava, I need to explain the “original” Varidig concept.

By the way, the name Varidig comes from Variable Digital. In my opinion, it's a good name. The only name that I like better doesn't belong to us – it is "Bitmaster" digital cable by Empirical Audio. In my opinion, this Bitmaster cable is not as good as the Varidig (conceptually), but the name is great!

Our standard Varidig – approximately at 1⁄4 of the Sextet price - is a good cable, and usually it’s accepted by the listeners well. The only questionable comment sometimes is that it sounds “dry” (this is probably the only complain I have ever had reported back about the Varidig). The Varidig MAIN concept: OVERALL impedance correctness and impedance matching between the cable itself and its terminations - is more "sound" from the pure technical point of view. I didn’t create this concept, it's known to engineers working with microwave (very high frequency) electronics. The circuit board traces are often made of variable thickness (for the impedance matching purposes) - so I just used the same idea and "transferred" the technology into digital
audio cabling.